Largest software development environment in the market

Read an interesting article over on Carsonified's "think vitamin" blog this morning. Ryan Carson and co are the folks behind the highly recommended Future of Web Apps Conferences (FOWA Miami, 08 was brilliant)

http://thinkvitamin.com/dev/web-development-is-moving-on-are-you/

This quote sums it up nicely:

    Web development turned from a niche for brochure-ware and intranets to one of the biggest software development environments in the market over just a few years. The web as the platform is a hollow dream no longer ‐ you can now run and develop a web application without needing to host anything yourself and you can even get the data from other sources. With this radical shift comes a lot of change for developers, but the question is, are you keeping up?